Filter - show only first 3 active tasks

[Jacob]

Hi, I'm new to MLO. Lots of new concepts :)
I'm trying to make a view which shows tasks in different aspects of my life. "Social", "Family", "Work" and so on. So I've set up some contexts named that, and turned on the "active actions by context" view. But I don't want to scroll up and down to see an endless list, I only want to see the first 3 tasks of each category.

How to do????

/Jacob

[Laurence Glazier]

Consider making an additional context called #3, and assign that to the three tasks in each area you want to see. Then set the filter to #3.

Hope this helps,

Laurence

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, Jacob. I can't suggest any way to do exactly what you are requesting but I might have a few ideas that could help. Two ideas, manual and automatic.

Manual: A lot of people have a daily (or nightly) review where they look at all of the things they might want to work on in the next day and pick out just the ones that they are committed to doing tomorrow, or that they believe they could or should wrap up tomorrow. A popular way or marking tasks as "in tomorrow's plan" is to turn on the star for each task. Then, the "starred" view will show you the things you have left to work on. Hint: only mark three tasks with stars and your view will show three tasks. This is pretty similar to the suggestion that Laurence has already made. Advantage: it's simple to understand and to do, and it is totally customized to you without much effort. Disadvantage: nothing happens until you go star your tasks.

Automatic: Try using the "Next Actions" concept. This automatically finds the next task you need to get done, one per active project, and one for each folder of non-project tasks. You may find that you have more than three tasks per life-aspect but you can use Importance, Urgency, Due dates, etc to force the things you need to do first to the top of the list. Disadvantage, it might take some tweaking to get it showing what you want. Be careful that you don't end up spending more time tweaking than you do working on your tasks. Advantage: once you get it working, it will show you the things you should be doing with a mionimum of effort on your part.
-Dwight

[Jacob]

Thanks a lot, both of you. It seems Dwight's first solution is similar to Laurence's. Dwight's is just a lot easier. I'm a fiddler on stuff like this, so I already jumped into fiddling with urgency, importance and effort sliders. I haven't quite figured out how they work yet, but I've managed to get a list similar to Dwight's second solution. Right now I think I will go with a combination of the two. Setting up stars at the "Next action" list when planing the next day, and use the "Stars only" list during the day. Not quite what I asked for, but in the end it might a be better solution?

/Jacob

[John . Smith]

Personally I have found that filters that only show the Next ONE Task to be of pretty limited value. The thing that I find the most powerful & useful is Dwight's "manual" suggestion i.e. to review ALL the 'Active' tasks and to Star the ones for focusing on today (i.e. during the next 24 hours).

What I then like to do is quickly go through my lists AGAIN just looking at the Next Actions to see if any of them need a Star too, as given that they are all top of the list within each project, it is quite likely that they should be starred. (If not there is a slight question of why not?)

That said, personally I do find that the Next THREE tasks to be a very much more useful view than Next One Task per project. The software I used most at present (Nirvana) allows you to dynamically choose how many (1 to 9) tasks per project you want to display. Intriguingly it even given you the option of stating that the entire project is either a Series or a Parallel project, and if a "Parallel" project it will force all tasks on to the Next [n] Tasks view. 

Unfortunately AFAIK there is now way of generating a Next [n] Tasks per project in MLO where [n] is any number other than 1. However even next one tasks is still slightly useful.

J

[Elizabeth Lindsay]

I think the problem with having "next X" is based upon what criteria?  If the project is set in order, then you can tell which are the next three.  But if it isn't based upon "complete in order", how would a computer know which three are "next" in a project?

[MG]

Hi 

I Agree with Elizabeth.

and adding some pepper in the juice:

What if, regarding the 3 tasks we want to focus on we could have a filter we create to do the job for the tasks (filter 1 as the minimum limit to whatever we want) according to the time we are.

Like: MLO filter me the three (4, 5, 10, etc) tasks to accomplish the next hour (30 minutes, next week, etc.) that I gave them a star or a specific context.

I would like your help, all of you. This feature would be handy.

[MG]

MLO Support Team,

Any development regarding this issue?

This is the one I look for, so long...

To have a dynamic filter according to the time I am on, in such a way I can manually define a View with this features

"Filter me the tasks for the next hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, and so forth"

Like in Calendar View, why not have filters "by day", "by time", without goinfg to define it in "Advanced features", like the ones we have for Contexts?

MG